Get Rid of the Caucus

Like many political afficionados around the country, I've been forever envious of the role the Iowa Caucus has played in the Presidential nominating process, and have yearned to, just once, have the opportunity to participate in this ultimate sport of political activism, however, as the 2008 nominating process comes to a close, I now not only have grave doubts about the Caucus, but earnestly believe the Caucus should be eliminated.

As we have seen played out in Caucuses around the country this year, the participants are representative of the most extreme ideology of the respective political parties. Participants tend to skew much younger, healthier with flexible schedules and leisure time at their disposal. The requirement to physically be at a given location for several hours to participate automatically excludes all military, National Guard and Reserves stationed away from home. The nature of the Caucus precludes the vast majority of hourly workers from participating, as well as most senior citizens, the infirm and disabled ... even stay at home Moms who would have to hire a babysitter to participate.

If Caucus results were factored out of the Democratic nominating results, Barack Obama would be leading Hillary Clinton by just *7* pledged delegates through the West Virginia primary and this doesn't take into account the results from either the Florida or Michigan primaries. Why is this important? Because if the Caucus states had held primaries, the pledged delegate totals would have been much closer to a tie.

How do we know this? A little known non-binding primary took place in Nebraska the same day as the West Virginia primary, where Clinton beat Obama by more than 40 points. That same day, Obama won the non-binding Nebraska primary by a mere 2 points, or just over 2600 votes, after he had clobbered Clinton in Nebraska's February caucus by 36 points. Some 38 thousand people participated in the Caucus while over 93 thousand participated in the Primary. In other words, three times as many people participated in a primary that doesn't count, in a state where Clinton never campaigned and had those results been binding, Obama and Clinton essentially would have split Nebraska's delegates rather than Obama taking most of the delegate count in a far less representative Caucus. A similar result occurred in Washington State, the only other state to hold both a non-binding Primary and Caucus where Obama won the Caucus by more than two to one, but beat Clinton in the primary by only 4 points with twice as many participants.

We can further extrapolate that had all states held primaries, Clinton would not have lost previously pledged super delegates and would have garned more new supers by virtue of winning most of the states Democrats must win in November to win the election and fairing much better in, presently, Caucus states where her overall support was much stronger than the Caucus results reflect.

Since it's been such a long time since we've had a Primary battle THIS close, it's important to look at these details because the goal of the Democratic party should be to field the candidate who will be strongest in the November election. What we can conclude from this exercise is the Democrats will probably not be putting up the stronger candidate with the broadest support, but the one who essentially owes his entire pledged delegate margin to a bunch of Caucus states, most of which are unwinnable for the Democrats in November.

There's gotta be a better way and it begins with dumping the Caucus in favor of Primaries.